I focus on the strategic, economic and business implications of defense spending as the Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates. Prior to holding my present positions, I was Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at Georgetown. I have also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. I hold doctoral and masters degrees in government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of science degree in political science from Northeastern University. Disclosure: The Lexington Institute receives funding from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and United Technologies.

The Army's Vision Of A Networked Force Is Rapidly Becoming Reality

The Abrams main battle tank has been the signature combat system of the U.S. Army for a generation, but the service's top modernization priority today is deploying a better battlefield network. Army leaders want combat units down to the squad level to be connected to the full intelligence and warfighting resources of the joint force, and after a decade of development work the service is beginning to deploy systems capable of delivering that connectivity to soldiers in the field. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As members and supporters of the U.S. Army gather in Washington this week for their association’s annual exposition, they have plenty to grouse about. After a dozen years of nonstop conflict in some of the world’s most godforsaken places, the service that did most of the fighting is seeing its formations cut and its funding shrink because the focus of national strategy is shifting to the Western Pacific — a region where geography tends to make air power and sea power more useful. Meanwhile, budget sequestration and political paralysis in the nation’s capital are undermining readiness and impeding investment in new technology.

Amidst all the bad news, though, something really positive, something revolutionary, is happening to America’s Army. It is becoming the most comprehensively networked and coherently commanded fighting force in history. A series of technology initiatives begun during the Bush years are beginning to reach the force that will largely lift the fog of war, providing soldiers with unprecedented awareness and insight no matter how trying their tactical circumstances may be. The end result will be a force that is more agile, more precise, more protected and more efficient — able to save money and lives through the smart application of new information tools.

At the core of the emerging battlefield network are two systems for instantaneously transporting diverse information between scattered forces and providing unfettered access to joint resources: the Warfighter Information Network – Tactical and the Family of Networked Tactical Radios. Both programs have been under development for over a decade, generating tailored signals (“waveforms”), interoperability standards, software and hardware that can deliver to warfighters the kind of information-age functionality civilians have come to expect from their internet service providers and smart phones. That is no mean feat in a place like Afghanistan, where items like internet connections, cell-phone towers and even reliable sources of electricity are hard to come by.

(Disclosure: Many of the companies engaged in developing the Army’s new networking tools contribute to my think tank.)

To understand why deploying a better tactical-communications network has become the Army’s top modernization priority, though, you need to grasp where the service is coming from. Much of the Army still relies on analog comms equipment developed during the Cold War, prior to what we now call the information revolution. Such equipment typically can’t handle large volumes of information in a timely fashion, is vulnerable to enemy preemption, and can’t communicate across diverse units due to the haphazard way in which it was acquired. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and again during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, combat units outran their communications capabilities and thus were in the dark about what was going on around them.

While the Army was relying on outdated equipment, the landscape of global commerce and culture was being transformed by the advent of innovations such as cellular communications and broadband networks. Today, most civilians in the industrialized world have access to broadband internet service on the go through mobile devices linked to a global wireless network. They can tap into global positioning services, send dense digital files such as images, and chat with users in exotic locations at will. The Army decided after Operation Iraqi Freedom began that soldiers should have similar options using a secure and resilient battlefield network.

The initial efforts at developing such a network did not fare well, because they were too ambitious. The Army’s concept for a family of networked vehicles called the Future Combat Systems collapsed in part because too much was expected of the network, which became fabulously baroque in its complexity. Similarly, the Joint Tactical Radio System conceived to deliver unprecedented functionality and interoperability with dozens of incompatible legacy devices using software in place of hardware encountered repeated developmental setbacks due to its technical requirements. But even as these efforts were restructured, the Army was sorting out what was feasible for the future and assembling the items needed to bring a robust battlefield network to fruition.

Today, the Army has begun deploying its vision of “a single, secure, standards-based network” to the fielded force, enabling timely, versatile connectivity from the top of the joint command structure down to the squad level. The broadband backbone of the new network is the Warfighter Information Network – Tactical, or WIN-T, which uses internet-protocol technology to connect the force via satellites and line-of-sight nodes. The initial increment of WIN-T enabled commanders at the battalion level and higher to quickly halt and communicate securely up the command chain, tapping as needed into the joint force’s global information grid. Increment 2, which began fielding in 2012, provides on-the-move communications down to the company level for the first time, and will be followed by a further increment starting in 2018 that achieves the goal of a comprehensively connected combat force that can get whatever information it needs without slowing down.

Complementing this digital backbone is the Family of Networked Tactical Radios, successor to the Joint Tactical Radio System program. The new program includes handheld, man-pack, embedded and vehicular radios that create their own ad hoc, self-healing networks without the need for vulnerable fixed infrastructure like cell towers. Not only are the new radios much smaller and lighter than legacy devices — the handheld versions resemble large cell phones — but they support multi-channel communications using specialized waveforms that enable transmission of talk, text, chat and pictures in any battlefield conditions. Like WIN-T, they utilize internet-protocol technology that is inherently more efficient in exploiting available bandwidth. Simply stated, these radios will afford soldiers greater situational awareness than ever before.

It is not easy to sort through the complexities of what the Army is accomplishing with its new battlefield network. The technology is arcane, the programs are obscure, and the Army’s terminology for explaining network applications is often hard for outsiders to understand. Fundamentally, though, the network that the U.S. Army is now deploying to its troops will make survival and success on future battlefields more likely, and tragedies like friendly-fire incidents very rare. Soldiers will know more about where their friends and foes are in the confusion of battle, and will be able to call on a host of intelligence sources and tactical resources that were previously beyond reach. Whatever the fate of the Army’s other modernization efforts may be, the fielding of this robust new battlefield network will transform maneuver warfare and keep the Army ahead of its enemies for many years to come.

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